Watched it while having dinner in Leoben, Austria near where he is from. It was pretty cool. The whole restaurant stopped, went to the bar and watched/cheered as he did it. The reaction here when he landed was incredible. Never seen a whole restaurant just stop like that. Awesome experience.

Godric wrote:people are all bummed he didn't break the free fall record.... he was accelerating for a longer time maybe thats why?

I don't know how much of a difference it would have made (though I'd be eager to know if any of the LGP physicists can answer that), but Baumgartner deployed the parachute at ~1,500 meters (4,900 feet), while the actual record holder, Evgeny Andreev (1962 attempt,) waited until 960 meters (3,150 ft.). Andreev beat Baumgartner by 10 seconds. Interestingly, Andreev was freefalling from only 25,500 m.

Still gotta give crazy props to Joe Kittinger. Look at all the technological advances we've had since the 1960s when he did his jump.

(Conspiracy Theory Alert: I think they had a deal to not break Joe's freefall record so there would be something to shoot for next time.)

I don't think Joe Kittinger owns the freefall record, because he jumped with a drone parachute.

The actual freefall record belongs (since 1962) to this guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Andreev (he indeed jumped without any stabilization chute). As I wrote above, Andreev actually opened his parachute about 1/3 mile closer to the ground compared to Baumgartner. I have, sadly, forgotten almost all my physics education, but since the Baumgartner's chute was designed to be opened when his speed was no higher than 170 mph, provided that he would have kept the same speed (and I am not sure he would), during the 1/3 miles extra freefall, he would have traveled extra 0.33/170*3600 = 7 seconds. Andreev's actual freefall time beat Baumgartner's time by 10 seconds.

DelPen wrote:I'm amazed he nailed the landing zone. People were there within seconds to help him.

The oxygen countdown really put things into perspetive, if he doesn't get to land in under 10 minutes he would pretty much be dead.

He needed the oxygen during the free fall because there was little oxygen in the air (plus the temperature, pressure, etc.). Once he got out of free fall (6000 ft in this instance?), he could have breathed on his own.

I wonder how the sensation of free falling that fast compares to the guys like Ed White who did the tethered space walks, since technically someone doing a space walk is falling at around 16,000mph. They just keep falling in a circle.